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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6460939" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, the way I've worked it is the Heroic tier adventurers are fighting fairly 'mundane' sorts of bad guys. They may well have supernatural abilities of some sort, but like the PCs they don't teleport into a castle, fly long distances regularly, or that sort of thing. If they do for example fly its a fairly natural thing like stirges. Maybe at upper Heroic tier things start to get a bit more interesting. At that point the PCs are beating back threats to their little home area and starting to interact with the bigger forces that move and shape the happenings there. As they graduate into paragon they are now fighting a more fantastic type of foe. They begin to discover the overall shape of the campaign arc. Certain foreshadowed things begin to take shape. The characters are embarking on their paragon paths, major life paths where they solidify their alignment to the higher powers and their final destinies begin to take shape. They are now reaching the greatest levels of power ever achieved by mortals in their homelands. No character may yet be a true legend, but their names will be remembered for centuries. Their actions start to be significant to the whole world they live on at upper paragon.When the reach epic, then their destinies are clear, they are agents of something, movers and shakers in a world where they may well be the most powerful beings to have arisen in many centuries, legendary heroes who will populate epics for a thousand years and never be forgotten. Their enemies now are demons and gods, the greatest dragons, and finally fate itself. Their foes will be the great powers of the world, equipped with the most fantastical of powers, capable of reshaping the Earth itself and changing history for all time.On a more practical level I go for a very high fantasy action-movie-like kind of game. Heroic PCs are running around in collapsing mines, burning buildings, leaping onto moving carts, flying on hippogryphs, and having a battle in the rigging of pirate ships. Paragon characters are having fights in an unstable cloud fortress, the mouth of a pit into the underdark that has a crumbling magical ward, flying down into an erupting volcano to stop the forging of a mighty weapon, and venturing into the more accessible parts of other planes of existence (the feywild for instance). Epic characters are sliding down the side of one of the mountains that holds up the sky on a god's slipper in a giant avalanche after killing an Elemental Prince. The action is analogous but more and more crazy.There are mechanical differences in approach that have to be taken into account as you advance. Low level PCs are pretty manageable and you can challenge them basically within the structure of the encounter system outlined in the DMG. You just need to watch out to make the encounters dynamic enough that they don't turn into overly tactical slugfests. Its easy to plot these kinds of adventures, the PCs will pretty much go where you point them, or at least you know what they're able to pull out of their hats. They can improvise and make clever plans, but its unlikely to bust an entire plot. You don't need to lard it on too much to make monsters challenging. Paragon characters start to emerge into the 'wow, you can do that?' stage. As you get into higher paragon monsters themselves become fundamentally too limited to really provide a challenge (aside from just throwing some preposterously powerful epic monster at the party, and even then they'll surprise you). Characters have access to genuinely strategic level magic like teleports, long distance flight, extreme stealth, and enough resources to construct some very useful items. You can't seriously challenge them anymore with mere terrain or simple mundane situations. You'll need to start thinking about things that go beyond what is ordinarily thought of as the framework of 4e. Start breaking the rules. At epic monsters are almost a meaningless thing in terms of a challenge. You CAN eventually pound the characters into oblivion with enough firepower of course, but no reasonable tactical setup that falls strictly within the bounds of the monster manuals and such will really present a very interesting fight. You have to introduce a new type of element into the game. Plot becomes MUCH more important at this point. When the characters face challenges they need to be of an absolute sort, you MUST do X, and the consequences of not doing X are at best hard to mitigate and impossible to avoid entirely. Obviously a big ploy here is the threat to the whole world/universe/whatever. For this to work though you have to have laid the groundwork well from the start of the campaign so that the character's town/city/kingdom/world is now a PERSONAL ASSET of the character, it in effect belongs to the character in dramatic terms. Its really all about story evolution, and the nature of challenges evolving over the course of the tiers. Most DMs that find Epic hard to deal with in particular are not thinking enough 'out of the box' in terms of making up game elements. They try to hew too close to the rules frameworks. That's OK up to a certain point, but there comes a time when you want to invent the deadly demon venom that simply CANNOT be cured except with the holy water of the Well of Life.</blockquote>

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